Top Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners

When you run a small business, you may feel as though you just don’t have time for everything.

You may find that no matter what you do, you never quite manage to get your to-do list finished and this can cause you major problems if you let it get out of hand.

Log Everything

Before you do anything, you need to spend one full day logging your time. Open up a

spreadsheet and start filling it out from the moment you wake up. You then need to track every single minute of your day. It’s so important that you don’t try and change your behavior on this day, because if you do then you will never have an accurate representation of how you spend your time. Sure, creating a list like this can be time-consuming and tedious, but it will show you where your time is being wasted.

Know your Time Wasters

When you have completed yourtime log, you can then categorize the activities. It helps to do some basic calculations as well so that you can find out how much time you spend on each activity. The goal is to find the areas where you are spending too much time, whether it is phone calls, in meetings, on a break or even running errands for people. This is the first step towards finding out where your day is going and it can also help you to be far more productive as a result. If you are spending too much time emailing or phoning people then it may be worth looking intovirtual assistant services.

The Pomodoro Method

This technique is a fantastic way for you to manage your time better. It involves setting an alarm

or a timer so that it rings at 25-minute intervals. You then need to spend this whole time focusing on one task. When the time is up, you can then have a 5-minute break which also needs to be timed. This will help you to make sure that you are getting at least 2 tasks done every hour, and it also means that you don’t spend too much time on one thing. If you don’t have enough time to get one task done, then this means that you need to make yourself more efficient so that this becomes possible.

80/20 Rule

One effective way for you to try and determine where you should be spending more time would be for you to follow the 80/20 rule. The idea is that 80% of your results will come from 20% effort. You want to try and increase the amount of time you spend each day on getting results, and then spend the rest of your time taking care of the little things that don’t tend to achieve much. For example, if you get most of your business leads from phone calls, you would want to spend more time doing this rather than spending your time chasing up emails that don’t usually end up doing anything for your company.